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The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility, is now accepting proposals for the 2016 ALCF Data Science Program (ADSP). The new initiative is targeted at “big data” science problems that require the scale and performance of leadership computing resources.

For Argonne’s 29th annual Science Careers in Search of Women (SCSW conference), approximately 300 female high school students from across the Chicago area visited the laboratory for a day of panels, tours, career booth exhibits, and mentoring. As part of the event, ALCF staff led the young women on a tour of the facility and provided a crash course on how supercomputers are used to enable scientific breakthroughs.

ALCF researchers collaborated with the VERIFI team to complet development of engineering simulation code and workflows that will allow as many as 10,000 engine simulations to be conducted simultaneously on Mira.

Over the past decade, University of Chicago professor and INCITE investigator Benoît Roux has made great strides in biochemistry using Argonne Leadership Computing Facility resources. One of his recent discoveries fills in essential information inaccessible to experimentalists, and potentially crucial to new therapeutic drug design.

The Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program will be accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns in a broad array of science, engineering and computer science domains. The INCITE program, along with the two LCF centers, will host instructional proposal writing webinars on April 13 and on May 19.

Scientists at the University of Washington are using Mira to virtually design unique, artificial peptides, or short proteins. Peptides have the best properties of two different classes of medical drugs today and could enable future, peptide-based medicines with few side effects. As researchers begin to develop new peptides, they are optimizing their in-house software to test thousands of potential peptide structure designs in tandem, requiring a state-of-the-art supercomputer.

This week, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, turns one decade old. ALCF is home to Mira, the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer, along with teams of experts that help researchers from all over the world perform complex simulations and calculations in almost every branch of science. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, we’re highlighting 10 accomplishments since the facility opened its doors.

Using Mira, physicists from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory uncovered a new understanding about electron behavior in edge plasma. Based on this discovery, improvements were made to a well-known analytical formula that could enhance predictions of and, ultimately, increase fusion power efficiency.

Target dates are critical when the semiconductor industry adds small, enhanced features to our favorite devices by integrating advanced materials onto the surfaces of computer chips. Missing a target means postponing a device's release, which could cost a company millions of dollars or, worse, the loss of competitiveness and an entire industry. But meeting target dates can be challenging because the final integrated devices, which include billions of transistors, must be flawless — less than one defect per 100 square centimeters.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory, led by Juan de Pablo and Paul Nealey, may have found a way for the semiconductor industry to hit miniaturization targets on time and without defects.